Finding Peace While Playing Music at Camp Redwoods

Brendan Clemente
1 min readAug 28, 2024

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I had this wild experience playing a set at the Camp Redwoods festival the other week. Normally I freak out about shows; do I sound good enough, are the levels right, is the audience liking this, am I talking too much, did I play that riff wrong, and a million other things are going through my head.

But something else happened there. I stayed present, felt myself fall into each moment, each song, into my craft, and genuinely enjoyed it. And the crazy part?

It wasn’t like none of that other stuff happened — I did pay attention to my sound, I did pay attention to my singing, I did adjust my levels… I just didn’t do it from a place of worry, but a place of confidence and trust, maybe what some might call flow.

And I literally felt the hundreds of people there sharing the same feeling with me.

Slowing down and taking a moment to look up into the trees and truly enjoy where we were felt like a life-changing moment. Still blown away by that feeling… not euphoria, or relief, but peace.

I hope every musician gets to experience that feeling.

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